In the United Kingdom, this information is already collected. It's supposedly a "voluntary" agreement, but the Act provides that the Secretary of State may make it compulsory if it isn't being "voluntarily" made available.

"According to [1], Internet Service Providers must record thefollowing information:1) the IP address assigned to the customer2) a precise identification of the (dial-in) port that is used forinternet access (i.e. your phone number, customer number etc)3) connect and disconnect timestamps

This does however not include logging IP connection attemps to yourfavorite blog or website or anything like this.They only have to log the IP address and connection times of yourdial-in session.

Besides that, there is an explicit statement [2] that forbidsrecording contents or data related to the visited web pages."

Having read this, I don't think its a bad idea at all.. after all they are just logging who is on the network .. and not what you are doing!!

Fine, such law or bill. However, any query to the log by the police should get a court order first. The police should not be allowed to query the log at will, as the police forces in most western countries are not allowed to search a private house hold without a court warrant. The digital log is essentially a private house hold of the service provider.

Also your current position is tracked for mobile phones and secret services do not need any court order, they can do it preventively. The so called online raid will be secret and has already been practiced by the authorities although the courts have repeteadly denounce it as illegal.

Schäuble also wants to shoot down passenger air planes (in case of a terrorist attack, but you will never know once a plane is destroyed), reintroduce torture as an interrogation method and set up Guantanamo-like prisons for "endangerers" who should be imprisoned before committing a crime among other measures to be taken.

All in all: This guy is a raging mad man who must be stopped, but he is just the tip of the ice berg. Democracy is at stake right in Germany.

Wasn't the quote about shutting down Gmail in Germany relating to a completely separate provision requiring personally identifiable info (e.g. home address) to be stored for each email account? That would be unenforceable, as it would be necessary to manually confirm details with each person with an account.

It seems to me that THIS law simply requires some logs to be kept which (if examined carefully) *may* also reveal personal details (note that Google probably already keeps logs like this anyway though) – and although this may have privacy implications, surely this is a separate issue from the one mentioned in the 'shutting down' discussion?

Pjh, I'm not completely sure. I found the original statement by Google on Heise.de, which was quoting Wirschaftswoche, and Heise.de in their article with Peter Fleischer's comments (heise.de/newsticker/meldung/91 ...) referenced this article as point of debate (heise.de/newsticker/meldung/88 ...), an article which is about this "Vorratsdatenspeicherung". However, I was not able to retrieve the Wirschaftswoche article anymore unfortunately while preparing this article, they took it down or behind some reg-wall by now.

Pjh, this is strange. Heise's first article linked above references an older Heise article which already states that enforcing personal identification during registration will not be part of the "Vorratsdatenspeicherungs" law anymore. It may be that Heise confused some issues (they are the biggest IT news site in Germany)? This seems to indicate though that you're right and Peter might have referenced another part of the law. I would need to see the original article at Wirtschaftswoche now.

I added an update to the post.

This thread is locked as it's old... but you can create a new thread in the forum.